The average smartphone turns men into gods... until we need a camera that zooms, or reception off the grid.

9 Essential Gadgets the iPhone Can't Replace... Yet

9 Essential Gadgets the iPhone Can't Replace... Yet

Our smartphones are the Swiss Army knives of the digital age. But in place of nail files and can openers, they've leveraged microprocessors, touchscreens, and the omnipresent wireless architecture of the Internet to tackle any problem—from balancing friendships to balancing checkbooks, from navigating the night sky to navigating rush hour traffic. (Remember when telephones, point-and-shoot cameras, portable media players, maps, PDAs, and calculators were all separate items?)

Despite their power and versatility, however, our smartphones can't do everything. We still need discrete devices in everything from survival to entertainment, and we can't unify all of our gadget needs into one device—yet.

Game Console

Game Console

Angry Birds is the bestselling game of all time. But when hardcore gamers have an itch to scratch, smartphones don't hold a candle to full-blown gaming consoles.

Interestingly enough, the lack of deep, immersive games on phones is not necessarily a problem with cellphone processors and GPUs: While Xboxes and PlayStations only see hardware upgrades every eight or so years, iOS and Android devices get massive technological improvements every year. The problem may in fact be twofold. The first is obvious in Angry Birds itself, which achieved its phenomenal success largely because of its simplicity. Disposable, casual titles have proven so successful for pocket experiences and are so much cheaper to produce than Hollywood-scale console games, that they have come to dominate mobile gaming while leaving the blockbuster AAA games to consoles. Second is the fact that touchscreens still lack the incredibly accurate controls we get on gamepads (and that gamers like to play Call of Duty on the big screen).